"The OpenCL working group has taken the decision to converge its roadmap with Vulkan, and use Vulkan as the basis for the next generation of explicit compute APIs – this also provides the opportunity for the OpenCL roadmap to merge graphics and compute."

PC Perspective's Scott Michaud went on and listed a few reasons why this makes sense and will benefit both the OpenCL as well as Vulkan API.

While both occupy similar spaces, OpenCL still supports a wider range of compute devices, have support for SYCL, which is a royalty-free, cross-platform abstraction layer that enables code for heterogeneous processors to be written in a “single-source” style using completely standard C++, and is basically better in some things, while Vulkan API is currently a marketing star that has gained a lot of support from developers.

In any case, it appears that Khronos Group will create a single API that will integrate both OpenCL and Vulkan API into a single entity which could become both more popular as well as much better than DirectX 12.

Hopefully, Khronos Group will reveal a bit more plans about this "merger" in the near future.

During its Apple Special Event, Apple's Craig Federighi shed some quite interesting light on the new Maverics OS X and how it actually behaves and improves hardware usage on the 13-inch MacBook Air.

According to Federighi, OS X Mavericks will bring up to an hour longer battery life in web browsing if you install Mavericks OS X and even provides better memory allocation with "compressed memory".

Not to make it all about battery and memory, Mavericks OS will also be focused on intergrated graphics and thanks to OpenCL, Apple says that they have seen up to 1.8x improvement in performance thanks to enhancements. According to Federighi, Mavericks will have quite a few enhancements on the graphics side, including Core Image on OpenCL, Dynamic VRAM, Core Animation Scrolling, Unified IG Memory Module, Layer-Backed Views and OpenCL on IG. The GPU will actually be able to allocate up to 1GB of memory when compared to Mountain Lion OS X that peaked at 512MB.

In any case it sounds quite impressive and we certainly hope that these performance improvements will be seen across the entire range of Apple devices rather than just the 13-inch Macbook Air.

ARM has submitted its Mali-T604 GPU to Khronos in order to get Full Profile OpenCL 1.1 conformance, bringing desktop GPU computing features to the mobile, embedded and smart-TV markets.

ARM is actually the first GPU supplier to submit its GPU for Full Profile OpenCL conformance with Khronos, an organization that handles Full Profile and embedded profile OpenCL 1.1 certification. According to ARM, GPU computing is a growing trend that uses the performance of the GPU in order to augment the CPU for certain applications where the GPU is more effective thus providing improved performance and energy efficiency.

ARM claim that Full Profile brings a lot of gains as all desktops, notebooks and servers actually implement Full Profile rather than embedded profile. Most of the existing OpenCL software is actually written for Full Profile platforms and there are quite a few features that are optional in Embedded Profile including native support for 64-bit integer maths that will be much faster and more efficient as they are implemented in hardware, hardware accelerated support for 3D images, compliance with IEEE 754-2008 precision as well as built-in atomic functions accelerated in hardware which speeds up parallel computation as they are handled directly by hardware.

The Full Profile OpenCL driver is more attractive to developers as they do not need to worry about which features are supported and which are not, and it generally reduces the cost for developers. Of course, Embedded Profile code will also run without any problems.

The Mali-T658 and Mali-T604 GPUs have been announced quite some time ago and are ARM's fourth generation GPUs that are based on Midgard architecture. The Mali-T604 is said to deliver up to five times performance improvement over previous generation and have been specifically designed for GPGPU-based application. In terms of specs, ARM's Mali-T604 has multi-core scaling as it can feature up to four shader cores, has 32KB to 256KB of configurable L2 cache, built-in Memory Management Unit (MMU) with support for virtual memory, has support for OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0, OpenVG 1.1, OpenCL 1.1, DirectX 11 and Renderscript and supports 16xFSAA and 4xFSAA (4xFSAA with minimal performance drop) anti-aliasing.

ARM's Mali-T604 is expected to debut in Samsung's Exynos 5250 SoC, previously scheduled to go into mass production in Q3 2012.

Finalwire has updated its system diagnostics and benchmark suite to version 2.2. The new version brings a couple of new updates including support for Intel's Cedarview Atom, Ivy Bridge and Intel 7-series chipset as well as support for recently launched Radeon HD 7970 graphics cards.

In addition to added support for new hardware, the new AIDA64 v2.20 also brings in a new OpenCL GPGPU "Stress Test" and adds ACPI 5.0 and OpenCL 1.2 support. The new test is actualy a module for AIDA64 Stability Test group and features support for AMD CrossfireX and Nvidia SLI configurations with simultaneous stressing of all available GPU and APU devices, including the next-generation AMD Trinity and Intel Ivy Bridge APUs.

As noted the added support for new hardware includes Intel Atom Cedarview, Intel Core Ivy Bridge and Intel's 7-series chipsets as well as GPU details for AMD Radeon HD 7970 and Nvidia's Gefroce GT 640 graphics cards.

Techpowerup has updated the its own graphics hardware information and diagnostic utility software, most commonly known as the GPU-Z, to version 0.5.2. The new version fixes several stability/reliability issues and brings support for new GPUs from both camps, as well as the additional support for Intel's Sandy Bridge based graphics.

The main novelty is the support for AMD's recently launched dual-GPU Radeon HD 6990 card as well as the support for Nvidia's yet to be released Geforce GTX 590 dual GPU card. The new GPU-Z also brings support for GTX 550 Ti and GTX 560 Ti cards, as well as improved support for the GTX 570 and Intel's Sandy Bridge graphics. The new GPU-Z now also supports the CHL8228 VRM controller found on certain Radeon HD 6900 series card and brings better OpenCL detection and improved driver-based monitoring support for AMD/ATI GPUs.

The new GPU-Z can be found and downloaded directly from Techpowerup, here.